“No food or lodging shall be allowed to a Quaker.  If any person turns Quaker, he shall be banished, and not be suffered to return on pain of death.”

These objectors can readily believe the fact, that in the city of New York, less than a hundred years since, thirteen persons were publicly burned to death, over a slow fire:  and that the legislature of the same State took under its paternal care the African slave-trade, and declared that “all encouragement should be given to the direct importation of slaves; that all smuggling of slaves should be condemned, as an eminent discouragement to the fair trader.”

They do not call in question the fact that the African slave-trade was carried on from the ports of the free states till within thirty years; that even members of the Society of Friends were actively engaged in it, shortly before the revolutionary war; [18] that as late as 1807, no less than fifty-nine of the vessels engaged in that trade, were sent out from the little state of Rhode Island, which had then only about seventy thousand inhabitants; that among those most largely engaged in these foul crimes, are the men whom the people of Rhode Island delight to honor:  that the man who dipped most deeply in that trade of blood (James De Wolf,) and amassed a most princely fortune by it, was not long since their senator in Congress; and another, who was captain of one of his vessels, was recently Lieutenant Governor of the state.

[Footnote 18:  See Life and Travels of John Woolman, page 92.]

They can believe, too, all the horrors of the middle passage, the chains, suffocation, maimings, stranglings, starvation, drownings, and cold blooded murders, atrocities perpetrated on board these slave-ships by their own citizens, perhaps by their own townsmen and neighbors—­possibly by their own fathers:  but oh! they ’can’t believe that the slaveholders can be so hard-hearted towards their slaves as to treat them with great cruelty.’  They can believe that his Holiness the Pope, with his cardinals, bishops and priests, have tortured, broken on the wheel, and burned to death thousands of Protestants—­that eighty thousand of the Anabaptists were slaughtered in Germany—­that hundreds of thousands of the blameless Waldenses, Huguenots and Lollards, were torn in pieces by the most titled dignitaries of church and state, and that almost every professedly Christian sect, has, at some period of its history, persecuted unto blood those who dissented from their creed.  They can believe, also, that in Boston, New York, Utica, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Alton, and in scores of other cities and villages of the free states, ’gentlemen of property and standing,’ led on by civil officers, by members of state legislatures, and of Congress, by judges and attorneys-general, by editors of newspapers, and by professed ministers of the gospel, have organized mobs, broken up lawful meetings of peaceable citizens,